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| "I could have sworn it said Fancy Dress..." |
Actors have endless ways to pretend. The best seduce the audience; those less blessed - the hams, hacks and journeyman - have always needed A Thing. They become great
eating actors, expounding dialogue through mouthfuls of mashed potato, or unbeatable
smoking thesps, jut-jawed and wreathed in blue fog. For some, like the late Australian legend Frank Thring, it was all about the eyes.
If you think you don’t know Frank, you’re wrong, at least if you’ve ever clockwatched through
Ben-Hur or nursed a
Sunday afternoon hangover while
El Cid gives the Moors a bloody good thrashing yards from your bloated mug. Thring was the guy acting almost entirely from the nose up, a stiff, waxen-faced stage dummy vivified only by his burning gaze; the villain without whom no toga-buster or historical epic could do without. For a time in the ‘50s and '60s, Thring’s dual repertoire (incandescent rage/jaded perversion) made him a big star.
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| Thring's legendary upstaging of John Wayne's 'Roman soldier #2' in Ben-Hur |
Little Frank was born into the buttoned-down Tunbridge Wells-with-flies that was
1930s Australia, the son of film studio boss Frank Snr whose Melbourne set-up was responsibie for a string of dire one reelers and
gag-free slapstick knock-offs. In a town with no cheer, the privately educated showbiz scion was an outsider from the start. His early role as Lucifer in a TV ad betrayed a ready aptitude for camp devilry but it was on the London stage that Thring met his cloven-jawed destiny; audience member Kirk Douglas was so blown away by Thring’s scenery-chewing
Titus Andronicus that he persuaded the Australian to jack in his Earls Court lodgings for Hollywood and a career as a villain of limited emotional range.
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| The playbill for Thring's breakout Salome. He was also the owner of the theatre company. |
It was with Douglas that Thring made his great cinema breakthrough, as the scheming, jaded Aella in Richard Fleischer’s 1958 saga
The Vikings. The part kicked off five golden years in which Thring played the scheming, jaded Pontius Pilate (
Ben Hur); the scheming, jaded AI Kadir (
El Cid) and the scheming, jaded, perverted Herod Antipas (
King of Kings). By the time MGM were casting for that airbrushed, blow-dried Jesus-flick, Thring had already wowed Australian theatre critics with his interpretation of Herod in a Melbourne production of Oscar Wilde's
Salome. But Hollywood's enthusiasm of to have him reprise the role on screen overlooked two key facts. First, Thring’s talent as a stage actor lay in his broad style, which swamped audiences in a tide of melodramatic charisma. Second,
1950s Australian critics claiming to have witnessed great theatre on Oz soil were more hopeful travellers than inhabitants of an artistic promised land. It soon became clear that Thring had no inclination to tone down his style. His standard act was to lounge and preen with hooded eyes and the expression of a lewd piranha, before bursting into action, striding screen right, eyes wide and flashing, declaiming with cut-glass enunciation his final dastardly business; resume throne, hood eyes, cut, print.
Thring could be discounted as just another second stringer were it not for clues to a deeper talent. On stage, he played opposite Olivier and was cast as Ahab by Orson Welles in the great man’s ill-fated experimental West End adaptation of
Moby Dick. His turn in Tony Richardson's
Ned Kelly in I970 is scaled for cinema and works beautifully.
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| The inflatable camera never took off |
And away from the screen, Thring was just as endearingly, relentlessly expansive, a trait that made him an accidental national institution in his native Australia.
He’s often described as ‘larger than Iife’, a euphemism for both boozehounds and homosexuals, clubs of which Thring was a wildly enthusiastic member. In the days before the words ‘Sydney’, ‘Mardi Gras’ and ‘relentless Hi-NRG beats’ became inseparable, Thring’s off-set catchphrase was ‘Bring me another boy, this one has burst!’ — a statement of outness that leaves ‘I’m free!’ sounding somewhat limp.
One Melbourne scenester of the 1970s recalled a moment that perfectly encapsulated the actor’s talent for dominating a scene even when no-one was filming: “We were at a house party and Frank stumbled in, dressed all in black, with an incredible amount of jewellery, wraparound sunglasses, and a tankard of what I think was scotch. He was perspiring freely and muttering. He looked appalling. Then he tripped over himself and fell through the glass coffee table. Someone tried to bring things back to normal by asking, ‘Didn’t you know
Charlton Heston?’ ‘Know him?!’, Frank replied, ‘I was in him!’
